- A leak claims some major changes are coming to Arrow Lake
- We do not know their nature, except that they are ‘voltage frequency’ related
- This could be the start of some big performance improvements for Arrow Lake
Intel’s tweaks, which are coming to help improve the performance of the recently released Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 200S) processors – which were quite disappointed upon their arrival – could be about to land.
Or at the very least, we’re about to witness the start of Intel fixing these desktop CPUs. Expert overclocker Skatterbench (who is affiliated with Asus and regularly sets world records with the company’s motherboards) at X tells us that Intel has some big changes planned in the next microcode update for Arrow Lake chips (such as always with herbs).
These relate to the ‘VF behavior’, which means voltage frequency, and so on VideoCardzwho noticed this pointed out that the overclocker likely already has access to the beta update.
Hopefully it won’t be long before all the tweaks and improvements introduced here are available to all Core Ultra 200 CPU owners (although there will undoubtedly be a beta BIOS implemented by motherboard manufacturers first before the full release).
Analysis: A New Chapter for Arrow Lake?
So the crux of the matter here is whether these changes are about delivering better performance for the Core Ultra 200S family, or perhaps more about solving overclocking issues (as Skatterbench points out later in that thread on X). This means that these (rumored) adjustments could be more about, for example, strengthening stability (especially when overclocking), rather than sprucing up Arrow Lake CPUs with performance improvements.
The expectation is that this has something to do with Robert Hallock’s (VP of marketing at Intel) earlier observation that Arrow Lake’s disappointing performance (particularly in gaming) was due to multiple issues in Windows and the BIOS, and an accompanying promise that solutions will arrive. for those problems.
Is this upcoming microcode patch the start of these fixes? That’s entirely possible, but we should temper our expectations as it appears Intel still has a lot of work to do in this area. Don’t forget, we’ve also been promised a full audit of all the issues at play with Arrow Lake’s missteps, so it seems like a thorny tangle of gremlins in the making, and we’re betting this will be a multi-step solution (for “ multifactorial problems” as Hallock called them).